Fighting Bosworth

Published21st August 2015

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Chapter
3
: Private Feuds

Northumberland’s deliberate inaction at Bosworth highlights the need to
view the battle through the eyes of its participants, not merely through
the actions of Richard and
Henry
alone. With battle came the legitimate opportunity to settle old
scores; it was on the field that private and public grievances could be
settled as one. The Stanley feud with the Harringtons is a well known
example; it provided an opportunity for Stanley to ensure that his local
rival was all but destroyed for taking Richard’s side, leaving him with
‘
no livelihood’ and
in ‘great poverty’ as a result of his attainder after the battle, which
Sir James Harrington’s nephew later claimed ‘was laboured to be made by
Thomas late earl of Derby, for old malice and grudge that he had
’. Richard Beaumont went so far as to declare that Thomas Stanley had ‘caused’ Sir James Harrington to be attainted, ‘where in for a truth the said James was never against the King in no field’.[1]

The Stanley-Harrington feud was not the only one amongst those fighting
that day. One north Midlands squire, John Babington of Dethick, was
allegedly killed by James Blount, motivated by the chance to increase
his inheritance. But Blount got the wrong man. His intended target had
been John Babington of Chilwell. Other men had personal grievances
against the Yorkists. William Troutebeck, whose family had possession of
Oxley manor in Hertfordshire, had his lands confiscated by Edward IV
who, according to a petition lodged by Troutebeck, had ordered its woods
to be cut down and sold as timber. Troutebeck, on hearing of Henry’s
landing, ‘
came unto your most honourable service, at your last most victorious field’.[2] Reynold Hassalle was rewarded for his ‘good and trusty service, specially at our victorious journey’ with the restoration of his office of bailiff of Grene, near Stafford, which he had occupied through the gift of the Duke of Buckingham, but which Richard had apparently ‘put him out of the same’.[3]

Other grudges fought out that day were more long-standing. Robert
Harcourt was the son of John Harcourt, a rebel in Buckingham’s revolt
who had died at Henry’s exiled ‘court’ on 26 June 1484. His father’s
lands had been confiscated upon his attainder, being granted to
Richard’s supporters, including Viscount Lovell.
[4]
John Harcourt ‘went over the seas’ to Henry. His motivation to turn
against Richard seems to have stemmed from the king’s support for the
Staffords of Grafton, a family with a longstanding hostility to the
Harcourts. The feud between the families had begun in 1448 when John
Harcourt’s father, Sir Robert, a veteran of the French wars, was
involved in a fight with Sir Humphrey Stafford, in which Stafford was
struck on the head with a sword and Harcourt was stabbed in the back and
pulled off his horse by one of Stafford’s retainers.

The case
never came to trial, but five years later Sir Humphrey retaliated by
besieging his property at Stanton Harcourt, where Sir Robert took refuge
in the nearby church tower and withstood a siege of six hours. Twenty
years later, however, the feud flared up again when Sir Robert was
killed by Sir Humphrey’s bastard son and 150 retainers. John clearly did
not forget his father’s death when the Staffords came to prominence in
Richard’s reign, and were serve him holding the fords of the Severn
against Buckingham. In the end, it was to be his son who would seek to
avenge the family name on the battlefield, supposedly at some stage
becoming Henry’s standard bearer at Bosworth, presumably after William
Brandon’s death.

17th century image of Battle of Bosworth

The final scene of the battle, around the scramble for the fallen Tudor
standard, the brave last stand of Sir Percival Thrivall, who held onto
Richard’s standard, despite having both legs cut from under him, has
become the stuff of legend, at times testament to Richard’s own bravery
and strength. In the eighteenth century, the antiquarian John Nichols
recalled speaking with a lady who had read a manuscript account of the
battle which had subsequently been destroyed, which stated that Richard
had cleaved William Brandon ‘
down the head at one blow’.[5]

Of course stories such as this, told long after the battle itself,
provide little evidence of such events occurring, however they cannot be
entirely discounted. In 1610, James Ley, claimed that his
great-grandfather, Henry Ley, had been ‘a man of arms’ on Henry’s side,
‘
and was near about the earl’s person, at such time the king was slain
by one Thomas Woodshawe
’.[6]
Yet we know that Henry Ley accompanied his lord Sir Robert Willoughby
to the battle, and that a Thomas Woodshawe, a tenant on the Middleton
Hall estate also owned by the Willoughby family, was rewarded on 20
September with the office of bailiff of the lordship of Berkeswell in
Warwickshire and made keeper of the park there ‘during pleasure’.
[7]

According
to Welsh tradition, it was Rhys ap Maredudd, known also as Rhys Fawr,
‘Rhys the Mighty’ who had immediately picked up the Red Dragon banner;
the same tradition also states that it was the same Rhys who killed
Richard, though another poet, Tudur Penllyn, gifts that honour to Rhys ap Thomas.

Rhys ap Thomas was rewarded for his decision to support Henry; indeed,
he was granted the office of Chamberlain of South Wales which he had so
coveted. Many of Henry’s Welsh troops were also rewarded. Adam ap Jevan
ap Jankyn was made the king’s attorney within Carmarthen and Cardigan,
‘
in consideration of the true service that our well beloved subject hath
done unto our noble progenitors of long time passed, and to us now late
in our victorious journey and field, to his great costs and damages
’.[8]
Through the grants, which have inexplicably been little explored, we
can obtain a fuller picture of those who fought at Bosworth, and who had
made the long journey with Henry from exile.